The History of Buddhist Thought c17.47

c17.47

One way of regarding the performance of austerities is to consider it as the heaping up of good karma or as neutralizing bad, but the list of the naked ascetic's practices is considered from a different point of view, in their possessing value as a means of training the mind. In the *Kassapasi-hanāda-sutta* (*Dīgha*, i, 161) the question raised is, “ among those things which are bad and accounted bad, blameworthy, to be shunned, ignoble and wicked, and accounted such, who is there who has put them utterly away, is it the ascetic Gotama or other reverend leaders of schools ? ” It is Gotama, and it is by means of the Noble Eightfold Path. That is the true meaning of becoming an ascetic and brahmin. The naked ascetic replies by giving a long list of repulsive practices in begging, eating, and sleeping.² They are rejected by Buddha because “ unless the attainments of morality, mental training, and full knowledge have been practised and realized he is far from being an ascetic, far from being a brahmin. It is in so far as a monk practises the thought of friendliness without hatred or ill-will, and with the destruction of the āsavas (lust, desire for existence, false views), and abides in this actual life having himself grasped and realized emancipation of mind and emancipation of knowledge, that freed from the āsavas he is a (true) ascetic and brahmin ”.